![]() ![]() Instead, as author and psychology professor Robert Cialdini explains, Democrats must offer Trump supporters a way to get out of their prior commitment while saving face: “Well, of course you were in a position to make that decision in November because no one knew about X.”Ĭolombians adopted a similar strategy in the 1950s when the Rojas dictatorship collapsed. They’re not going to win the 2020 presidential elections by convincing Donald Trump supporters that they were wrong to vote for him last November or that they’re responsible for his failures in office. And that’s an admission that most minds aren’t willing to make.ĭemocrats in the United States are already falling into this trap. Once you’ve equated someone’s beliefs with idiocracy, changing that person’s mind will require nothing short of an admission that they are unintelligent. At that point, the mind will dig in rather than give in. The moment you belittle the mind for believing in something, you’ve lost the battle. Schadenfreude might be your favorite pastime, but it has the counterproductive effect of activating the other person’s defenses and solidifying their positions. We belittle the other person (“I told you so”). Convince your own mind (or your friend) that your prior decision or prior belief was the right one given what you knew, but now that the underlying facts have changed, so should the mind.īut instead of giving the mind an out, we often go for a punch to the gut. The key is to trick the mind by giving it an excuse. To avoid admitting we were wrong, we’ll twist ourselves into positions that even seasoned yogis can’t hold. ![]() If facts don’t work, how do you change a mind–whether it’s your own or your neighbor’s? Give the mind an out “Facts, as John Adams put it, are stubborn things, but our minds are even more stubborn.” Did you meticulously read each link to get a broad objective picture? Or did you simply skim through the links looking for the page that confirms what you already believed was true? And let’s face it, you’ll always find that page, especially if you’re willing to click through to on the Google search results. If you have any doubts about the power of the confirmation bias, think back to the last time you Googled a question. Trending: The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work Doctors continue to preach the ills of dietary fat despite emerging research to the contrary. Aggressively mediocre corporate executives remain in office because we interpret the evidence to confirm the accuracy of our initial hiring decision. We believe in alternative facts if they support our pre-existing beliefs. As a result, our opinions solidify, and it becomes increasingly harder to disrupt established patterns of thinking. We filter out inconvenient truths and arguments on the opposing side. ![]() Doubt isn’t always resolved in the face of facts for even the most enlightened among us, however credible and convincing those facts might be.Īs a result of the well-documented confirmation bias, we tend to undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. ![]() Facts, as John Adams put it, are stubborn things, but our minds are even more stubborn. Since then, I’ve discovered a significant problem with this approach. Develop a strong case for your side, back it up with hard, cold, irrefutable data, and voila!ĭrowning the other person with facts, I assumed, was the best way to prove that global warming is real, the war on drugs has failed, or the current business strategy adopted by your risk-averse boss with zero imagination is not working. If you had asked me this question–How do you change a mind?–two years ago, I would have given you a different answer.Īs a former scientist, I would have cautioned you to rely on objective facts and statistics. ![]()
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